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\ / Charles Spurgeon's MORNING & EVENING
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Tuesday, November 13, 2007
MORNING:
"The branch cannot bear fruit of itself."
-- John 15:4
How did you begin to bear fruit? It was when you came to Jesus and cast
yourselves on his great atonement, and rested on his finished
righteousness. Ah! what fruit you had then! Do you remember those early
days? Then indeed the vine flourished, the tender grape appeared, the
pomegranates budded forth, and the beds of spices gave forth their
smell. Have you declined since then? If you have, we charge you to
remember that time of love, and repent, and do thy first works. Be most
in those engagements which you have experimentally proved to draw you
nearest to Christ, because it is from him that all your fruits proceed.
Any holy exercise which will bring you to him will help you to bear
fruit. The sun is, no doubt, a great worker in fruit-creating among the
trees of the orchard: and Jesus is still more so among the trees of his
garden of grace. When have you been the most fruitless? Has not it been
when you have lived farthest from the Lord Jesus Christ, when you have
slackened in prayer, when you have departed from the simplicity of your
faith, when your graces have engrossed your attention instead of your
Lord, when you have said, "My mountain standeth firm, I shall never be
moved"; and have forgotten where your strength dwells-has not it been
then that your fruit has ceased? Some of us have been taught that we
have nothing out of Christ, by terrible abasements of heart before the
Lord; and when we have seen the utter barrenness and death of all
creature power, we have cried in anguish, "From him all my fruit must
be found, for no fruit can ever come from me." We are taught, by past
experience, that the more simply we depend upon the grace of God in
Christ, and wait upon the Holy Spirit, the more we shall bring forth
fruit unto God. Oh! to trust Jesus for fruit as well as for life.
EVENING:
"Men ought always to pray."
-- Luke 18:1
If men ought always to pray and not to faint, much more Christian men.
Jesus has sent his church into the world on the same errand upon which
he himself came, and this mission includes intercession. What if I say
that the church is the world's priest? Creation is dumb, but the church
is to find a mouth for it. It is the church's high privilege to pray
with acceptance. The door of grace is always open for her petitions,
and they never return empty-handed. The veil was rent for her, the
blood was sprinkled upon the altar for her, God constantly invites her
to ask what she wills. Will she refuse the privilege which angels might
envy her? Is she not the bride of Christ? May she not go in unto her
King at every hour? Shall she allow the precious privilege to be
unused? The church always has need for prayer. There are always some in
her midst who are declining, or falling into open sin. There are lambs
to be prayed for, that they may be carried in Christ's bosom? the
strong, lest they grow presumptuous; and the weak, lest they become
despairing. If we kept up prayer-meetings four-and-twenty hours in the
day, all the days in the year, we might never be without a special
subject for supplication. Are we ever without the sick and the poor,
the afflicted and the wavering? Are we ever without those who seek the
conversion of relatives, the reclaiming of back-sliders, or the
salvation of the depraved? Nay, with congregations constantly
gathering, with ministers always preaching, with millions of sinners
lying dead in trespasses and sins; in a country over which the darkness
of Romanism is certainly descending; in a world full of idols,
cruelties, devilries, if the church doth not pray, how shall she excuse
her base neglect of the commission of her loving Lord? Let the church
be constant in supplication, let every private believer cast his mite
of prayer into the treasury.
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MORNING & EVENING from HEARTLIGHT /\/\
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Morning & Evening is the classic devotional by 19th-century writer
and preacher Charles Spurgeon. It's part of HEARTLIGHT Magazine,
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